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Office 2003 Beta 2 Screen Shots
frooyo writes "ActiveWin is displaying screenshots of Office 2003 Beta 2 including pictures of Outlook, Excel, Word etc. As seen by the screenshot - the task based interface is much more prominent. Also - Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface is now the default." Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
I've already seen all the comments about clone wars blah blah blah
on a more serious note is cloning the way to win? doubtful - how about innovating making it better rather than just cloning
Can someone kindly explain why I should pay more money to upgrade from 2000 to 2003 when 2000 does more that i need and i can get Open office which also does more than i need for free.
Ctrl-Z
Another $600 word processor from Microsoft. Even when I'm at a job where they use Office, nobody ever uses anything but Word to type some useless bullet points, or Excel to make a pointless chart. Tasks? Never used. I had a PHB who tried to assign me tasks once. He couldn't hotsync for a week after that.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Personally, i like the office interface, but perhaps that's just because i'm so familiar with it.
I think you just answered your own question.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
that points out a very specific problem with the open/free source movements... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
moo
The only thing that needs cloning out of Office is simply the compatibility aspect of it's documents.
No need to clone the rest of the package: the bloat, the security holes, etc. ;-)
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Well now that's an interesting thing to say. I've been using Outlook primarily for several years and I can't say that I've ever had a virus... let alone a virus caused by Outlook. I've received plenty, the trick is to just not open attachments from people I don't know.
Username taken, please choose another one.
This will likewise fail it.
Part of innovation is taking what works from past technology and then improving it. And both sides do this--and ought to. If one person came up with a very nice way of doing interfaces, it's really dumb to reinvent the wheel when you could, in fact, be refining the wheel and making it work *better*.
Obviously, nothing should be 'taken' to the point of intellectual property violation, but I think if *more* of this so-called 'theft' happened in software development, it'd result in much better software in general. Take what the other people did, fix the problems in it, make it better. Then maybe they'll take what you did, fix it even more, make it better.
And in the end you've got products on all sides that're more useable, more stable, and so on and so forth. I don't know how anyone can say there's something wrong with that. Building a better mousetrap doesn't necessarily mean you have to build it completely unlike every mousetrap ever made in the past.
You like MS Office, you say? Who's going to buy this for you? Are you going to buck up for your own copy at home? Or, like most people, are you expecting your company to buy it for you? That way, it's kind of like it doesn't really cost anything, right? Except it does cost something. It's money your company could have paid you directly. It's money your company could have used to improve their market penetration. It's money your company could have used to improve their facilities. It's money that could have been used to increase the R&D budget. It's money that could have been used to hire additional staff. And on and on.
But a new version of Office with pretty new buttons and a three panel view like Outlook? A new version that's intentionally incompatible with everything else in the world, including Microsoft's own products? That's precious.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Its really sad that the concept of running a computer nowdays necessitates the use of extra software above and beyond the OS to basically secure the OS.
"Doesn't everyone run anti-virus software?"
In reality shouldn't we expect more from modern OSes? Shouldn't the code be more solid than requiring monthly patches. Souldn't e-mailed executables be run in a sandbox? Its a pity we HAVE to have virus software and even its not good enough, you have to constantly update it.
Basically I'm just saying that our expectations on software quality are so abysmally low that we are willing to put up with this crap. Imagine if the manufacturer of your car said - Airbags are your responsibility, you should install those on your own. Then people could say "Doesn't everyone install airbags in their car?". Its ridiculous, software should be better.
In reality shouldn't we expect more from modern OSes? Shouldn't the code be more solid than requiring monthly patches. Souldn't e-mailed executables be run in a sandbox? Its a pity we HAVE to have virus software and even its not good enough, you have to constantly update it.
Nice argument. Funny.
And yet, people like you (not flamebait, I'm just trying to generalize here) will be complaining once Microsoft adds anti-virus features into the OS about program feature bloat and monopolistic anti-competitive practices.
I'm not a Microsoft apologizer, I like some things they've done and very much dislike others, but we can't have it every which way.
With assinine comments link this "Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)", as the footnote to this news posting. It now becomes clear to me why the computer GUI will never truely evolve beyond what it is today. Thanks Taco for the insight!
I'm sort of ashamed to say this, but I'm glad Microsoft is starting to tell users (in a roundabout way) 'sorry, you can't play with the big boys, because your OS SUCKS' (in relative terms).
Administering a Windows 98 machine on a 2K network is horrible. The methods for implementing everything are mixed up, you can't specify a home directory, the netlogon scripts don't even run (they run, but do nothing), and so on.
Microsoft's problem has always been keeping backwards compatibility until it shot them in the foot. DOS compatibility screwed up Windows 95, Windows 3.1 compatibility screwed up Windows 95, but of course they had to have it. The extra code, the extra junk, the more support, the ifs, the whiches, the switch/cases to make it all work on OSes that just aren't reasonably modern, it's a joke. If you can run Office 2k3, you can run Windows 2k. Upgrade. Seriously.
Kudos to Microsoft for leaving the stragglers behind so they can make a better product (god knows they need it often enough).
--Dan
No matter what other faults they may or may not have (fence sitter ahoy \o/) MS spend millions on research into human/computer interaction and user interface design.
And what has it led to?
A filesystem browser squashed together with a web browser (done for political reasons).
The Start menu (this has been torn to pieces on the Interface Hall of Shame).
WMP 9.
Outlook's custom widget (with the mailbox name).
Each version of Office using completely different widgets than all other apps in Windows.
All with poor UIs.
Most of the rest of what Microsoft's done has been heavily based on Apple's ideas, or HCI driven by technical flaws. There was the dual filename system because they made the poor choice to use 8.3 filenames. Then the Start Menu, because Windows developers used masses of completely unidentifiable data file names slapped in the same directory as the executable. MDI, which was produced for Windows 3.1 because the VM system sucked and MDI reduced load on it.
Occasionally they take ideas from OSS (did I read elsewhere in this thread about virtual desktops and taskbar applets?)
I *wish* they'd take the idea of virtual desktops. One of the biggest things Windows needs.
are more than happy to build interfaces based on the results of their millions of dollars worth of research and linux is all the better for it.
Is a combined web browser/file browser really that crucial or useful, or just included to help out ex-Windows users?
May we never see th
Open source could do just as well as Microsoft by employing graphic artists -- expert UI designeers need not apply. Apple seems to at least be trying, but sometimes I wonder if Microsoft's even employing user interface experts at all. If they do have them then they're not taking any serious notice of them. It seems more like they're aiming to make the interface look pretty and attractive, but no more useful than before.
A lot of what's being shown off in the screenshots are feature enhancements, but the basic problems of the UI with Windows and Office haven't changed at all. It's as if Microsoft is just throwing in any idea the programmers or feature-developers come up with, without properly testing it or verifying that it's actually useful and not going to create more problems for the user than it solves. For example:
Assuming that these screenshots are genuine, then Microsoft might have made minor presentation tweaks here and there, but it still hasn't fixed any of the real UI problems. Every one of these issues has been documented for years by experts who've spent a lot of effort researching them. Most of the issues have suggested solutions, but Microsoft's done absolutely nothing about it that's reached the consumer.
If open source developers want to mimic windows to attract users that way then I guess they can. But this doesn't mean it's a good interface. It's the opposite. Personally I'm hoping that the various independent-from-Microsoft open source UI projects come through and win the race with some good UI's, but I don't know what the chance of that is.
What on earth has "security problems" got to do with "word processor"? I realize the macro facility in Word & friends has some potential for abuse, but that is a very unique feature of those products. Remember when we told everyone that virus warnings about word processor files or e-mail were scams and to just ignore them? It wasn't very long ago.
If the Claris Works 3 that came with my 7-year-old Mac does what I need, I don't need to upgrade. No security issues, nothing. Legacy systems don't _have_ modern security issues because they don't have the "integration" with "duh internet". Heck, if it isn't on the net, what security issues are there? (Besides, Macs didn't used to have listening ports by default.)
Still like PaperClip on the old 8-bit micros? What possible security issues could there be? You're not going to get 0wn3d through a 300 bps originate-only modem.
I know Office is a whole other problem security-wise, but I take offense at the blanket statement that ALL old software should just die.